April 5, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Tech to Use Right Now: Tagzania
Easy, Embeddable Google Maps for Your Site
Tagzania.com offers an easy way to add contextual map experience to your site.
Tagzania allows you to:
- Create a point by searching for an address or clicking on the map.
- Add a description; including links to pictures hosted elsewhere, and links to stories
- Add keywords to your ‘point’ to help other users find your content
From there, it’s just a matter of clicking “Paste this map on your site” in order to generate some code that can be used throughout your site (depending, of course, on your individual templates).
In news stories where place is important, Tagzania can help illustrate the story for a reader. For example:
Point A: Factory leaking fumes
Point B: Schoolhouse where children became sick
Point C: Bakery where bread became contaminated
I created a quick map using AAN’s offices and two hostels I worked at to illustrate some possibilities.
How do you think Tagzania could work for your publication? Or do you have a better mapping tool we should know about?
Tags: maps
Roxanne Cooper:
April 6, 2007 at 5:24 am
Real Estate advertising seems like a no-brainer, esp if you have a set of Open Homes listings. How ’bout using it to plan out a night of club-hopping?
Don Eggert:
April 30, 2007 at 11:04 am
I’ve been noticing a lot more custom Google Maps on other sites. Yelp! uses something called TeleAtlas which I haven’t really looked into. We show google maps for all of our restaurant listings based on the address field in a database. Unfortuantely, the user clicks away from our site to see the google map interface. I would love to embed a mini map on each restaurant’s page, but it’s not really feasible to customize 600+ listings. Do you think Tagzania or something else could automate this process?